Ian Felice, lead singer of New York State’s Felice Brothers is pale and wan, his clothes hang off his coat hanger like shoulders. Not really the interview type, he visibly winced as I asked him about the cancelled UK Tour (Dec 2011). “Yeah, the Tour got cancelled because I developed shingles on my face. I went to see a Doctor in Berlin and they were really concerned ‘cos it was really close to my eye and apparently that can affect your eyesight. So they told me to rest and we had to cancel the Tour. At that point we had been on the road for three months and I think I had been overworked and my body was at a low ebb and pretty much telling me to rest”.
He settled back into his chair and continued. “This week we played our first show for three months, we had a great time. It felt pretty good; it was a nice British Crowd”.
What do you mean by a nice British crowd? I asked. Shifting awkwardly in his seat he said. “I don’t like to generalise but . . . people are quieter when you are playing the softer songs. Generally, in the US they can be pretty noisy regardless of the songs”.
You guys seem like you have been touring for ever, I commented. “Well for the past six years we have been touring for around half a year, but prior to that there was no touring at all . . . We started off busking at farmers markets and playing the street a lot because we couldn’t get other gigs ‘cos we weren’t really good enough . . . Then we started to get a few gigs in the bars and restaurants”.
So in the early days what sort of songs did you get asked to play? Felice laughed out loud at the memory of those early days. “Because I sound a little hoarse voice wise and I had a harmonica, we would get asked to do Bob Dylan songs. We did a few in the early days in the restaurants, but we kind of found it a little annoying ‘cos we had a lot of our own songs and we pretty much wanted to play them, or maybe some of the traditional songs that we were doing at the time”
Knowing his love for poetry and literature I asked him to tell me a little about his literary influences. “I like a lot of British literature . . . one of my favourites authors is Shakespeare, but I read plenty . . . John Milton, you know Paradise Lost, William Blake, WH Auden, Thomas Pynchon, I like to read a lot of stuff, you can learn so much from these people”.
Felice was relaxing and I chanced my arm a little. Having seen the Felice Brothers live on a number of occasions I was aware that they were what I would describe as a moody band, sometimes energised and electric, but sometimes distant and perhaps wishing they were back in the Catskill Mountains. With some relief, I saw a half smile flash across his face as he responded. “Yeah . . . I totally agree . . . It hard to determine what affects that, I think we can and specifically I can be a little bi-polar at times, sometimes I am really enjoying it and sometimes I guess I am just doing it and that reflects on the bands performance”. Pausing briefly he chuckled at a distant thought, “I guess we’re all human” he said, with a widening smile. “I guess we think about the Catskills a lot” he continued, almost in auto-pilot now. “Upstate New York, it’s a picturesque mountainous rural landscape, with a sparse society, just a gas station and maybe the odd restaurant if you are lucky, there’s not much going on. It’s mostly agriculture and construction” he mused, “but we love goin’ home and we get such a lot from there”.
Felice was fiddling a little with his finger nails, notoriously uncomfortable in interviews; he seemed however, to be in full swing. I asked him to tell me a little about the new record, ‘Celebration Florida’ had they used the same producer? “Yeah, we’ve used the same producer Jeremy Bacofen throughout, but we wanted to make something that sounded different. The environment and the rooms we recorded in was different, it was an old school that we used, I think the result was has changed the sound a lot”
I suggested that the new album contained more compositions as opposed to songs. “Yeah that’s true, I think less of these songs ended up being chordal with a lyric, there was a lot more use of noise and synth and I think that changed the sound and the style that people are used to”.
Accordion player, James Felice joined us for a few moments. Smiling and open, he told me about his input into the song writing and his involvement with such epics as Indian Massacre and Sailor Song for instance. Laughing out loud, he elaborated. “I have a different style of song writing to Ian. Personally, I consider him a much better song writer than me. I guess I tend to write songs that are historical in nature; Indian Massacre is like a western, a guy trapped in his cabin with Indians all around him. I tend to use a time line of events and I like the song to make sense, so I love stories”.
Hearing my comments on ‘Celebration Florida’ he continued almost apologetically. “Sometimes I do worry that we overproduce things . . . The new album is more complex. I agree many of the songs are not very ‘song like’ . . . You know like verse chorus bridge etc. etc. We wanted to change what we did a little and write some stuff or compose some stuff in the studio rather than have a guy guitar sitting under a tree, doing like we did in the past.”
I asked James too, about the influence of their home land. “The Catskill Mountains . . . I never lived anywhere else, everything I do relates to that environment and how I grew up, the nature of the family. If you go outside you don’t see another house, just trees. We were always outside in the woods. I like the history of the area and how the settlers arrived and the revolutionary war and the link to the Hudson River where many of the battles were fought”.
I asked him to elaborate on the strange mix of the old and the new in their songs. He was quick to take up the story. “Many of our songs are inspired by the old days, not in a sentimental way, more in an interesting way. Ian is a man who lives in the present but has a foot in the past. There are certain phrases and words that were only used in the past, but right next to that you will find something completely new. Lots of the songs on ‘Celebration’ are very modern, but in a way it is real folk music telling a story of what is happening right now”.
Pausing briefly for Breath he continued, clearly enjoying the theme. “I think there is a movement toward Americana and folk music, as people draw away from things like ‘American Idol’ . . . But just because you play an acoustic instrument doesn’t make you real . . . It’s not what you are playing but HOW you play it. I think a lot of hip hop music is more real than a lot of the ‘Folk Music’ we get, because it comes from a place of real poverty of desperation. A lot of our folk bands come from LA or Laurel Canyon and I am not really sure how real that truly is”. He said, laughing again.
With that they got the call for the sound check and dutifully trooped off to another day at work. That night the band came alive once more, with Ian leading from the front in animated style. But it was youngest brother James who played out of his skin, giving a performance that frankly invoked memories of Jaques Brel at his most theatrical. A giant on the stage, he stole the show as every single person in the packed venue, sang the words to “Whisky in My Whisky”. It seemed to me that the Felice Brothers were back on fine form. AJT
Article by Alan J Taylor
Photos by Sarah Marie Smith
http://www.thefelicebrothers.com/
http://www.thefelicebrothers.com/
